Selling Peace of Mind with Bhaskar from YottaDB

The Business of Open Source

This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar, founder of YottaDB. This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including:

• How the open source ecosystem, and the open source business ecosystem, has changed over the past 30+ years.
• Who can responsibly self-support an open source database, and who really needs to have someone to call if things go wrong.
• The spectrum of professionalism among open source developers
• How YottaDB started out as a project developed inside a larger company that was in financial services; and Bhaskar decided to spin it out as it’s own company.
• The challenge articulating the value of support contracts, especially for software that is reliable. Bhaskar says he is selling peace of mind more than anything else; and he works with customers to avoid incidents — because ultimately avoiding an incident is a better outcome for everyone than a quick recovery from an incident.
• How to convince people that they are actually not as good at managing open source databases as they think they are.
• We also talked about conference strategies: according to Bhaskar, the way he’s decided which conferences to exhibit at is a series of trial and error — and by the way, this is something I’ve heard from many people. Yes, you have to think about where your customers are, not where your friends are, but sometimes you don’t know ahead of time which conferences are going to have the best ROI.

I’m working with YottaDB right now on how to differentiate themselves in the crowded database market — and we talk about that process a bit right now. If you’re having trouble standing out in a crowded market, you might want to work with me.